Ramp­ing up glob­al pro­duc­tion of remde­sivir, Gilead CEO Dan O’Day de­tails plans to dis­trib­ute 1.5M dos­es to fight Covid-19 — for free

Gilead is still some days away from turn­ing the card on its first round of da­ta on remde­sivir’s abil­i­ty to fight se­vere cas­es of Covid-19, but the big biotech is ramp­ing up an emer­gency sup­ply of a mil­lion cours­es of ther­a­py as it starts free dis­tri­b­u­tion of the drug to tens of thou­sands of pa­tients un­der their com­pas­sion­ate use and ex­pand­ed ac­cess pro­gram as well as clin­i­cal tri­als.

In his lat­est open let­ter post­ed over the week­end, Gilead CEO Dan O’Day out­lined how the com­pa­ny has been suc­cess­ful in cut­ting pro­duc­tion time on remde­sivir while re­pur­pos­ing some of their own fa­cil­i­ties and turn­ing to con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers to build a near-term sup­ply of 1.5 mil­lion dos­es. They are still work­ing on ef­fi­ca­cy and dos­ing, but that sup­ply could cov­er 140,000 cours­es of treat­ment. That sup­ply, he added, would be more wide­ly avail­able fol­low­ing a po­ten­tial ap­proval.

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